The project revolves around understanding the uniqueness of a place and its characters. Deconstruction of the passage and understanding semiotics played an important role in comprehension of an idea. This thereby allowed us to look at each of the features more closely and interpret them visually and in writing.
The monuments in a place creates another layer of interpretation and the influence it has on the people and the environment.
Octavia- Thin cities in Invisible cities by Italo Calvino speaks about the spider web city and the lifestyle within this environment. The silken threads of the web relates to the thoughts that often entrap us from moving ahead. My narrative relates to breaking free from these thoughts which is visually seen through the tunnel book.

At the start of this project we were introduced to Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and read a common passage on the city of Isidora. In the first week we explored the meaning of this passage and wrote a narrative on the city. Based on this narrative, in the studio class we made visuals that illustrated the story that we had written.

By the next week, we had read the whole book and were asked to choose a passage that we wanted to work with for the rest of the project. The passage I chose was cities and eyes (1) that describes the city of Valdrada. In this week, we explored how memory was connected to our passage and wrote a short paragraph exploring this connection. In studio, we made visuals bringing out the essence of this connection through black and white silhouettes.

In the third week, by answering some questions on constructed environments, we studied how Calvino had described his cities and given each city a unique landscape. In studio, we again made black and white visuals, which gave a sense of how our city would look. We then also tried to make cut outs from this visual. In the fourth week we looked at semiotics. We deciphered how signs and symbols in our city had a hidden metaphorical meaning that we hadn’t explored and made visuals and cut outs for the same.

In these three weeks, although we worked with one city and looked at different aspects of it, each class was a little disconnected from the other. In the fifth week, everything finally came together and all the written work and visuals that we had made aided the final outcome of the project, which was a tunnel book.

In this fifth week, based on our complete understanding of the city from the work we had done, we wrote a story that was then translated into a tunnel book with 15 cut outs. For the tunnel book all the layers of the city that we had explored based on memory, constructed environments and semiotics came together to form one three dimensional visual. As we had worked with our cities over the period of four weeks in seminar and studio, it was much easier to construct a story and visualize it in the form of a tunnel book and elements from all our previous visuals seamlessly came together for the final outcome of the project.